REVIEW: Mutilate – Now the Angels Weep [EP/2018]

Imagine the purest suffering you can fathom. Do your best to distill all the pain and misery you’ve endured in your life—it might be a little, or maybe it’s a lot—just try for a moment. Dig deep and drag it all to one spot in your mind and just focus on it.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

To try and take every incident and atrocity you’ve committed or witnessed while you’ve been alive is a daunting task for sure. If you were successful—and I’m sorry if you actually tried and were, but lighten up, it’s an intro to a review—your reaction was probably something else. Now think of something so insanely perverse and violent that God himself would shudder—that Satan might cringe and that the angels, in their holy magnitude, might weep. If you do, I’ll bet it sounds a whole like the second EP by slamming beatdown act Mutilate. Now the Angels Weep is a ruthless display of boundless hatred worthy of the EP name and honest to the band’s name in kind. Riff-heavy, laden with countless lurid slams and brutal to the last second, Now the Angels Weep is an absurd listen to say the absolute least.

Every aspect of Now the Angels Weep is geared towards being as ruthless as humanly possible. From the opening riffs and jarring salvos of “Now the Angels Weep,” to the very end of the album, Mutilate wage war on the listener in a manner that deteriorates sanity and skull alike. Laden with drums that run the gamut from unbelievably fast to slow, sinister and sludgy, tracks like the raunchy album opener, as well as “Burial” and the lead single “Emissary Ov Despair” see the band’s percussive element in rare form, as, all the while, low and groovy bass serves as a firmament for the band’s monstrous guitar. While not quite as ear-catching as the band’s insane drumming, Mutilate’s fretwork remains a thing to be feared. “Absolution in Consequence” is one such example, just as “Burial” and “Plagued” are. Every track is a brutalizing display of aggression that takes no prisoners. The band trade between lead-fisted beatdowns and gut-melting slams that are linked by scathing riffs and insanely fast drumming to keep listeners guessing throughout the entire EP.

If you haven’t picked up on it yet—or maybe you’re just skimming (and that’s fine)—absurdity is the name of the game when it comes to Mutilate’s second release, and that absurdity isn’t simply limited to the group’s instrumental efforts. Now the Angels Weep is wicked in every aspect, and the group’s vocal element is damned sure to rub that in the listener’s face. Constantly abrasive and utterly immense, growls and grisly guttural bellows like those on “Obliterate” essentially define what Mutilate’s vocal component is all about. Where the first couple tracks—“Obliterate” especially are dense with vocal effort, other tracks (“Plagued”) are a little more focused on delivering instrumental insanity, using vocals and lyrics more sparingly. Because of their tactical use, the vocal element never gets truly monotonous, even where a little range might have been welcome in some instances. That said, Mutilate have a major in morbid brutality, and where that coincides with the band’s vocal effort, they earned that degree magna cum laude.

Mutilate’s sophomore offering is a huge step up from their debut on all fronts. Where they could benefit with slightly sharper production (primarily where the guitars are concerned), much of their allure is the primal, punishing nature of their music. Now the Angels Weep is just that—primal—inducing primitive, Neanderthal, lack-of-respect-for-human-life style mosh wherever it’s heard.